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The Theatreguide.London Review
A
Kind Of People
Royal
Court Theatre Winter 2019-2020
Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti has
written, and Michael Buffong directed a very Royal-Court-kind of play, a
solidly realistic domestic drama that examines and illuminates life in
fresh and convincing ways.
It is a play about racism,
but also about how very many people, black and white, only cope with life
through a sort of elective denial, and how very fragile that coping
mechanism is.
A black Englishman experiences a bit of racism, the particularly insidious kind in which the racists aren't even consciously aware of the assumptions and attitudes that generate their actions.
It is not the man's first
encounter with racism nor, sadly, will it be his last. But something about
this one makes it the camel's straw, the one that sets loose the
accumulated anguish of all those that came before and makes him unable to
pretend they don't matter or that things will get better.
Robbed of that protective
denial, he is set emotionally adrift, not sure how to deal with his anger
and pain.
This dissection of the effect
of a lifetime of racism will be fresh to many, and thoroughly convincing.
And then the playwright's insight goes even further. The man's loss of the
ability to repress his pain proves infectious.
A woman comes face to face
with her own prejudices, which a moment earlier she would have denied
having. A man is moved to blurt out a secret he has kept repressed for
years.
A mother buckles under the unsuspected pressure of worrying about her children's future. A woman acknowledges that she has always felt superior to even her closest friends.
It is not solely the victims
of racism who get by only by repressing and denying their pain, and the
loss of that defence can be even more soul-shaking than the pain itself.
The play and production
believably put a disparate group of people in the same room and then watch
them crack under their own individual and personal pressures one by one.
Richie Campbell is particularly moving as the man broken by just one insult too many, and Claire-Louise Cordwell as his white wife who thought their special bond made them immune from all life's problems.
Judging by the way different moments in the play generated gasps of recognition from different corners of the audience, it is not only people of colour who will see something of themselves in this unspectacular but deeply affecting drama.
Gerald
Berkowitz
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